the blurb girl

Welcome to my reading challenge. I started this list in 2015 with no specific end date in mind. It’s compiled from a different sources of ‘Nation’s Favourite Books’ or ‘Top Books to Read before you Die’ articles but didn’t include any that I had already read. I thought that would be cheating.

I started it with the view that this would be a real achievement – all these hard books that I was going to read. However, as I have gone through the list I have realised that many of these books are not the dense, tricky challenge I thought they would be. I am now out to persuade you that whoever you are, you can find a classic to read and enjoy. I will also be honest and frank about why I think these books ended up on these lists and whether I think they deserve it or not.

*Hyperlinks denote read and reviewed. Ticks indicate read but not reviewed. All others… yet to read!

1. Pride & Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R.R. Tolkien
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – J.R.R. Tolkein
4. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King – J.R.R. Tolkein
5. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
6. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
7. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
8. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
9. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
10. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
11. War & Peace – Leo Tolstoy
12. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkein ✓
13. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
14. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
15. The Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follet ✓
16. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
17. Little Women – Louisa M. Alcott
18. Persuasion – Jane Austen ✓
19. Emma – Jane Austen ✓
20. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexander Dumas
21. Animal Farm – George Orwell
22. Of Mice & Men – John Steinbeck
23. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
24. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
25. Crime & Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevksy ✓
26. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
27. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
28. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
29. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
30. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
31. The Female Eunuch – Germaine Greer
32. Lord of the Flies – William Golding ✓
33. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
34. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
35. Middlemarch – George Eliot
36. Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf ✓
37. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
38. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
39. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley ✓
40. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster ✓
41. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe ✓
42. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
43. Dr Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
44. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Remarque
45. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
46. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
47. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John le Carré
48. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
49. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
50. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
51. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
52. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
53. The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
54. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
55. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
56. Sense & Sensibility – Jane Austen
57. Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
58. Tess of the D’Urbevilles – Thomas Hardy ✓
59. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte ✓
60. Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
61. Call of the Wild – Jack London
62. The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje ✓
63. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
64. Sons & Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
65. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
66. Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel ✓
67. Bring up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel ✓
68. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
69. Dracula – Bram Stoker ✓
70. Regeneration – Pat Barker
71. North & South – Elizabeth Gaskell
72. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
73. The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt ✓
74. The Diary of Anne Frank – Anne Frank ✓
75. 1984 – George Orwell ✓
76. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte ✓
77. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou ✓
78. Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
79. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
80. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote